This has been my only real complaint with the front office since Mickey took over. We should never trade up or trade away picks for players in today's NFL. If the 49er's continue this pattern, look for them to build another dynasty in SF.
There is a model that has proven to work in today's NFL, keep a small core of really good players and then constantly turn the roster over with influx of 1st-4th year players through the draft. Once those players make names for themselves you trade them while you still have them under contract and their value is still high. Something the Saints consistently fail to do is to re-sign or trade players before they reach free agency. Mickey likes the rest of the league to set the price, I assume he does this to answer to Benson for the amount he pays players, or he sucks a negotiating contracts. I tend to believe he is justifying to his boss why he pays players what he does to keep them versus being a bad negotiator but whatever the reason it hasn't helped the Saints.
Everyone expected Brees to be re-signed before he hit free agency but instead we had to use the tag on him and it hurt the rest of the team. They had 2 years to get the deal done after the superbowl and they just couldn't. It cost us Nicks and he's a good example of talent we developed that we got nothing out of. The Patriots are masters of turning players that they don't plan on having on the roster into trades for picks before letting them hit the market and get nothing out of it. Point is we need to do everything we can to increase our number of draft picks and that has been horribly lacking under Mickey. Don't get me wrong it's the only thing I think they have done a poor job of since he took over, but they need to reverse the trend.